JERUSALEM: Israel’s Supreme Court put back on the election ballot an Arab party that could be a kingmaker, hours after one Arab-Israeli politician withdrew under court pressure on Friday.
Last month, an electoral committee of MPs voted to disqualify multiple candidates for the Oct 27 general election, including those from the United Arab List.
The party made history after the 2021 election, becoming the first Arab party to join an Israeli government when it took part in a disparate coalition that briefly removed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from power.
On Friday, the Supreme Court unanimously overruled the lawmakers and allowed the United Arab List as well as another Arab party onto the ballot.
The justices, in a 7-2 vote, also reinstated the candidacy of Ofer Cassif, a far-left Jewish MP who is a relentless critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
The two dissenting justices said that Cassif supported “armed struggle against the state of Israel”, grounds for disqualification.
The Supreme Court has nearly always overruled the committee when it votes to ban candidates.
But at a hearing on Thursday, justices suggested they would back the ban on Sami Abu Shehadeh, who heads the left-wing Palestinian Balad Party. Abu Shehadeh withdrew his candidacy shortly after.
His party said in a statement that a court-ordered rather than voluntary removal of Abu Shehadeh from the election would have had “grave consequences for the country’s political and parliamentary life”.
Disqualification
The case to disqualify Abu Shehadeh relies on an article he wrote immediately after the raid on Oct 7, 2023.
Abu Shehadeh said in the article that the raid was an “important historical event”. He denied he was supporting the raid.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, a far-right ally of Netanyahu known for provocative statements, led the charge against Abu Shehadeh and called his exclusion from the election “a tremendous victory”, although he said he wished the Supreme Court had directly ruled against him.
Arab-Israelis, descendants of Palestinians who left or were forced out when the state of Israel was created in 1948, make up about 20 per cent of the country’s population.
Most identify as Palestinians and until 2021 had stayed out of Israeli coalition politics.
The United Arab List, known by its acronym Raam, took the unprecedented step in the latest election of also running a Jewish Zionist candidate, Yoav Segalovitz, who earned popularity in Arab communities for his police work on curbing crime.
Some analysts expect that Segalovitz’s inclusion could make it easier politically for Netanyahu’s rivals to forge an alliance with Raam and its leader Mansour Abbas, a moderate Islamist and former dentist.
Adalah, an advocacy group for the rights of Israeli Arabs, called the whole disqualification bid an attempt “to delegitimise Palestinian citizens and their parliamentary representatives and to turn racism against Palestinians into electoral propaganda”.
Published in Dawn, October 3rd, 2026
